Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Frank hasn’t seen him in decades. He had always just assumed Alan had got the hell out as soon as he was legally able. Who wouldn’t have? Had he – Alan – been living in this house all this time? With Vincent? Dear God…

  ‘Alan,’ he says. ‘It’s Frank.’

  ‘I remember,’ replies Alan.

  ‘And this is my son, Scott.’ He exerts a small amount of pressure on his boy’s back. Scott and Alan shake hands briefly.

  Printed on Alan’s shirt is a large, hirsute man in an unsettling leather mask. The man’s demented grin is missing teeth and there’s a filthy sock puppet on his hand. Scott’s eyes flash recognition. ‘I watch Mankind’s matches on YouTube,’ he says.

  ‘You do?’ Alan says. He puts equal emphasis on both words, as if he hasn’t spoken aloud for some time.

  ‘Yeah, his 1998 Hell in the Cell with The Undertaker is mint.’

  Like his father’s, Alan’s grin has started to rot. ‘Well, I’d agree that, ah, what he did that night wasn’t quite human, but as far as a display of wrestling goes, it, ah, it wasn’t his best. If you want to see what the man was truly capable of, I suggest you view his bouts with Terry Funk. Now those are, ah, real artistry.’

  ‘Aye?’ Scott says.

  Vincent speaks to Alan. ‘Didn’t I tell you about coming down when I’ve got people?’

  ‘I just wanted milk. I, ah, I didn’t know.’

  ‘That’s ’cause you’re always listening to them fucking tapes. What’ve I told you about them tapes? They’re not yours, they’re your mother’s.’ He stomps over to the fridge and removes the milk. ‘Here, give me your glass.’ Gripping Alan’s hand, which is itself still gripping the glass, he slops in the liquid. It splashes over both their clasped hands and onto the floor. ‘Milk, milk, milk!’ Vincent chimes, ‘For healthy teeth and fucking bones!’

  When the glass overflows he puts the milk on the side with a trembling hand. For the first time, he sounds like a man his age. ‘You can go back upstairs now.’

  Alan watches milk droplets tremor on his hairy wrist. Then he looks at his father and, though it lasts less than a second, Frank and Scott both see it: Alan’s eyes narrow and Vincent blinks.

  Then it’s over. ‘Bye,’ Alan says, and limps heavily from the room.

  Vincent leans against the counter with his hands across his chest. He stares blankly at the ceiling. Frank realises he’s still holding the ale bottle.

  ‘Just go,’ Vincent says. ‘Both of you. Before I change my mind.’

  Neither of them need to be asked twice.

  —

  From Vivienne Avenue there were several ways his father could have got back to their home on the other side of the estate, so Frank picked the longest one and walked it slow. He let himself in through the back door. Only the kitchen and living room were on the ground floor, and only his mother was upstairs, getting ready for work. Frank told her everything at Vincent’s had gone fine – Alan was OK, no hard feelings. She seemed to buy it, just as she swallowed the line when, asking after her husband’s current whereabouts, Frank said he’d gone to Fat Gary’s to pay the papers.

  He went downstairs again. Their house had a cellar that you entered from the kitchen. It was where his dad kept his fishing gear. In those days, Bernard Hulme was a keen fisherman who tinkered at his workbench most days after work, recalibrating reels and making bright, feathery fly lures. Fish liked those lures because they thought they were insects. They didn’t realise the cold steel hook until it was too late.

  Frank opened the cellar door and gagged on the moist, graveyard funk wafting up from the below. A faint light emanated from down there and, for some reason, there was a great deal of shredded tinfoil on the steps. He found his father at his workbench, his back turned to him. Bernie was wearing the decorating overalls he kept on a nail down there. More tinfoil by his stocking feet – big scrunched balls of it – and to this day, Frank does not know where it came from. Sometimes, late at night when he can’t sleep, he still finds his thoughts turning to that foil.

  ‘Dad,’ Frank said. ‘Dad.’ He felt moronic repeating the word, but it was the only neutral thing he could think to say; anything else would have fallen on an incline and sent them rolling towards God knew what.

  His dad turned, and maybe it was the greasy light coming off the old bulb, but he looked ghastly. His face was all creases and channels, his scalp pallid beneath thinning hair. Shadows had amassed under his eyes and in the hollow of his throat. Bernie Hulme was a lurching corpse, a Hammer Horror.

  ‘I’m busy, son. What do you want?’

  Only Frank could now no longer think of a way to say what he wanted to say, so he left his dad to his fishhooks and made for the surface.

  —

  Hood up again, Scott walks ahead. After what’s just happened in Vincent’s hot, bright house, the night seems huge and cool. Frank looks up at the sky, but the streetlights have sunk the stars. When was the last time he’d seen stars? The spotlights of the greyhound track continue their slow scissoring over the dual carriageway. In the blocks, there are still some lights on, still some signs of life, but not many and not for much longer. Soon, like the rest of this place, the high rises will be nothing but a rubble.

  ‘Scott,’ Frank says.

  Scott stops, turns around.

  ‘Take that hood off, man. You look like a thug.’

  He tugs it down.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Because I’m not alright.’

  He’s going to front it out, Frank thinks – part of him wants Scott to front it out – but then his son buries his face in the crook of an arm and cries. Frank hesitates, but when he finally does hold him, Scott doesn’t pull away. His hands, Frank realises, fit perfectly between the blades of his son’s shoulders.

  Scott rubs his eyes with his sleeves, embarrassed.

  ‘You were right,’ Frank says. ‘I should never have taken you there.’

  ‘Guy’s a dick.’

  ‘A massive dick.’

  ‘I feel bad for Alan. What’s the point of having a kid if you’re going to be a dick?’

  Frank says nothing.

  Scott says, ‘Did you see how his leg was all messed up, Alan’s? Did Vincent do that?’

  ‘No, but if you want, I can tell you how it did happen. I owe you that.’

  He nods. ‘Were you friends or something?’

  ‘Me and Alan? No.’

  They head towards the alley on Tan Row.

  ‘Are you going to tell Mam about this?’ Scott says.

  Frank laughs. ‘Are you?’

  Then Scott laughs. It is a good sound. One Frank has not heard in a while.

  —

  Frank’s wife Pamela – Scott’s mother – had been a secretary at the paint factory where Frank used to be employed, until it was sold to a Norwegian company that laid off half the workforce a fortnight before Christmas one year. Frank, a Clearasil-soaked virgin of nineteen, finally gathered the guts to ask her to the cinema. Pam was out by the fire doors, smoking with the rest of the girls. They all watched him approach, and their giggling was almost enough to send him veering through an open loading bay. In fact, the only thing that stopped him from doing so was imaging himself through Pam’s eyes. He projected a strong, capable man; a man who didn’t know what it was to lose. A man who bent the wills of other men to his own. Through her eyes it was Vincent she saw coming her way, Vincent asking her to the pictures that Saturday, and Vincent playing it cool when she said yes.

  The night of the date, Frank bought a new shirt, polished his brogues, and styled his hair in a way that covered as much of his forehead acne as possible. His mam wouldn’t stop fussing. Such a handsome boy, she kept saying, seemingly blind to his carbuncles. So handsome. You remind me of Bernie when he was your age.

 
At the mention of his name, Frank’s father did not turn from the television, though Frank saw his hand flex tighter around his can of Stones.

  Frank never did figure out how to tell his dad what he had wanted to tell him that day in the cellar. Perhaps, he thought, when he got a little older, it would come to him, and so he had waited. He waited twenty-two years until a series of crippling strokes took his father’s life.

  But Bernie’s question: Why his boy? Why Alan? Sometimes Frank almost believes what he had told Vincent, that they had just been stupid kids, that things had got out of hand…but it doesn’t quite sit right. There’s always that memory of Alan, unconscious and falling into the well, and he knows that for an instant he’d wanted it to happen. Had wanted it more than anything.

  —

  The streetlights don’t penetrate the alley and their footfalls ricochet against the tall brick walls. They pass Lily Butler’s Missing poster. Vincent had said she wasn’t coming back, but Frank hopes otherwise. He can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child.

  Scott leads them across the Green. Every third or fourth step Frank must jog to make up the difference in their strides. Soon, he thinks, they’ll move away from here, and when – when. Not if but when – they come back, the house Scott grew up in will be gone, along with the boy himself. Pam says this is just how it is – that Scott will one day worry about his own children in the same way – and he tries taking comfort in that, but he’s afraid. What if the distance he’s felt opening up between them soon gapes like the void separating Vincent from Alan? From his own father and himself? A void so deep you can’t hear the rock land?

  There’s still traffic on Hollis Road. Thankfully, Scott’s too focused on finding an opening in it to see how his dad is looking at him. The miracle of him.

  It won’t happen, Frank thinks. Not to them. No matter where Scott goes, he won’t let that gap widen. Even if he ends up on the other side of the world.

  Like Manchester, say.

  HEART

  OF

  CHROME

  Corina Clarke of Peelaw Bank

  Mould is an affliction around here. Only so much deluge can council brick take before waterlogging ensues, before the Judith Krantzes bloat on the shelves, before colonies of green fuzz take up residence in the grooves of your Kate Bush LPs, and your alveoli choke with spores. In this respect, Corina’s house is worse than most: Petri-dish blooms of the stuff have crept across her bathroom walls to the extent that she now loathes turning her back while showering, unable to fully discount sentience.

  She squeaks a swathe through the bathroom mirror fog and applies a layer of foundation, two ticks of eyeliner. Her tongue, when she pokes it out, is wine-black and sour. Work clothes consist of bobbled black leggings and a black top, an aliceband to secure her shower-damp hair (the blonde now the drab fawn of old chamois leather with two inches of grey root showing). Finally, she pinches the back of her hand. In some magazine or other she once read that if the skin there snapped back instantly, you were still young. There was still time.

  The kitchen table is how she must have left it the night before. A sozzled Olympic parody of interlocking wineglass rings, two empty merlots sharing the podium with an overflowing ashtray. Her phone lies face down in the mess. She flips it over and sees the waiting text message:

  HEART OF CHROME

  DONT SAy I never giveyou nowt. Beech x

  Beech. She lights a cigarette and re-reads the message while the kettle boils. What did Beech want? She’s no closer to an answer by the time she sits down with her instant Gold Blend.

  The kitchen doesn’t get sun until teatime, yet the air is already coagulating. Another scorcher on the cards: an Easter heatwave, so the radio had said the night before, that was due to last at least until the schools went back, not that you’d know they were even out. The streets were silent. Any other year – even at this hour and with the windows shut – she’d be hearing the shrieks and yells of school-free children, but two recent events had changed things. Firstly, phase one of Rowan-Tree’s ‘regeneration’ had already moved many families away, and, secondly, Lily Butler’s disappearance had spooked everyone. It seemed parents in homes which had not yet been bulldozed were keeping a close eye on their offspring.

  She drops her cigarette hissing into a wine bottle, splashes lukewarm coffee into the sink, and puts the milk back in the fridge (glimpses her barren shelves: those few mushy inches of cucumber, that bit of gnarled ham). The painting on the fridge door belongs to her granddaughter Una-Lee, named after an artist who had apparently come from this very estate. Corina had stolen it from her parents’ flat last week; the work freakishly good for a five-year-old: the red-eyed, green-skinned witch reaching up out of the toilet is capable of raising hackles. The witch’s emaciated fingers end in long, yellow claws and her teeth are black jags. The poor girl being grabbed has her knickers round her ankles, utterly doomed, her mouth an aghast ‘O’ of horror. Somehow, Corina thinks, her mother – Una-Lee’s great-grandmother – must still be at it with the Peg Powler stories. The willies she’d put up she and Jim when they’d been Una-Lee’s age; the two of them clinging to each other under the duvet as Mam stage-whispered: Peg’s in the pipes…she’s in the pipes and her arms are LONG. Of all the things for her mother to have forgotten – the names and faces of loved ones, what year it was – so strange that Peg remained.

  The fridge door creaks shut. Her head pounds.

  Still, time to get on.

  Corina lives at the top of Peelaw Bank, and each descending step replaces the warm dome of sky with a stagnant palette of greys and browns. Abandoned houses with steel sheets bolted over windows and doors; whale ribs of exposed roof joists where the tiles have been stripped. An easy £500, Max had once told her. The lead, too. At the bottom of the bank, all the streets to her left – Charnwood Street, Feltnam Street, Durham Close – streets on which she’d had friends and clients – have been replaced by a vast building site. A builder, naked from the waist up, exits a portakabin and, tilting his face to the sun, slaps his sizable gut as if it were a ceremonial drum.

  Hollis Road is quiet as she lights her second cigarette of the day. She crosses onto Stanhope Street, then walks the long bow of The Crescent until it gives out onto the precinct of shops on Tan Row. The glass frontage of Yvette’s is the first of eight units and, as usual, Yvette is at the hotplate frying rashers and pucks of black pudding. She doesn’t look up. Gary’s newsagent is three units along from Yvette’s. The narrow door is open, but the window shutters are down – have been for years – and it’s too dingy inside to spot Gary himself. Save for hers, the rest of the units are empty. Behind each door a yellowing pile of unopened circulars and final demands, the husks of flies, bellies up. In the unit neighbouring her salon, someone has attempted to reverse-write SHAZ IS A SLAG in the window suds, but got the S’s and Z backwards.

  Hair by Corina is the final unit. She rummages in her bag for her keys and clatters up the shutters.

  Inside, the place smells of scalp, shampoo, and mildew. Three chrome cutting chairs glint in the morning light, matched by an equal number of hooded dryers against the back wall – brainsuckers, Jim used to call them – their Perspex domes the colour of burnt sugar. A desk with moneybox, phone, and appointment book. Framed, hand-drawn hair model sketches on every wall. By all appearances just another humdrum Friday, but not for Corina. Today these objects are charged with significance.

  She boils the kettle in the backroom. Along the far wall runs a strip of reinforced glass letting in subaquatic daylight from the alley beyond. Below this is a slapdash stack of cardboard boxes, some stencilled with logos and brands: DRAX DOMESTIC BLEACH, MEGA SAVE WIRE SCOURERS, McADAM’S MEATBALLS IN RICH GRAVY. There’s no paracetamol in the drawers so she takes her coffee onto the salon floor.

  Did she do something last night? Deep into her second bottle, she’d done something. A pho
ne call? To who? To Beech? Is that why he’d texted? She goes to check her call log, but her phone isn’t there. Must have left it on the kitchen table. Bravo, Cor.

  Her coffee is cold by the time the old woman enters. Despite the heat, she’s wearing a heavy beige mac and fixes Corina with eyes, or eye – one is a scuffed prosthetic – sunk deep into her rumpled head. She doesn’t cover her mouth when she coughs.

  ‘My tubes,’ the old woman finally says, ‘are murder.’

  ‘Good morning Mrs Terry. How are you?’

  Mrs Terry doesn’t respond. Her stiff fingers work her coat buckle. Corina hangs the mac on the stand next to the dying yucca while Mrs Terry lowers herself into the reclining sink chair. It’s always strange to see the elderly like this, looking up at you with their heads resting in the salmon-pink basin; the position does something to them, makes them younger, their skulls re-materialising from beneath sloughed flesh. The pipes vibrate violently when Corina turns on the water. An agonised groan – iron twisting, whales dying – rumbles up from deep below their feet.

  ‘You need to get them pipes seen too,’ Mrs Terry says.

  ‘They’ve been getting worse.’

  ‘Mine are going the same way.’

  ‘Just old, I suppose.’

  Water quivers mercurially in the creases of Mrs Terry’s forehead. The remains of her grown-out perm darkens, sags. ‘Not that they’ll be your problem after today though, will they? I seen Pam Hulme on the 551. She says you’re shutting.’

  ‘That I am,’ Corina says. ‘After today.’

  ‘Gillian?’

  ‘I let her go last month.’

  ‘So it’s just been you?’

  ‘Just been me.’

  Clients often nod off under the warm water, but not Mrs Terry. The old woman’s good eye remains trained on her throughout and her hand is lumpen, crustacean, when Corina helps her out of the sink. She shoots Corina a crepuscular look in the mirror as she settles into the cutting chair. ‘You’re better off alone,’ she says. ‘Folk aren’t worth it.’